As I Lay Dying were at the top of their game when things took a turn for the worse in 2013 when singer Tim Lambesis was arrested and later convicted on murder for hire charges as he attempted to have his ex-wife murdered. That left the members of the band in the unenviable position of starting anew under the moniker Wovenwar while still reeling from their estranged singer's actions. Wovenwar are ramping up to their second album titled Honor Is Dead, and guitarist Nick Hipa has stated that the disc is a more aggressive album fueled by the band's anger over reactions resulting from the Lambesis fallout.

In a new interview with Billboard, Hipa digs a little deeper into the fallout from the Lambesis arrest, stating that the singer's exclusive interview in Alternative Press after receiving his six-year prison sentence fueled some "overly opinionated and under informed" backlash from those who took what Lambesis said as a reason to attack the singer's ex-wife and the band themselves.

"The day he had to account for what he had done, all this comes out. And then the response to that was a lot of people supported him. A lot of people said negative things about Meggan and her family, and it was very hurtful to them," stated Hipa. "They felt like [as] the victims of the situation [they] never had a voice, never stood a chance."

Hipa says the Lambesis interview set the tone for people to be critical of them and the singer's ex-wife over the next year or so without knowing the full story. "None of them know those kids or that woman like we do. They don't understand what he put them through to get her to a place to be like, 'You know what? I have to protect these children from you,'" explains Hipa. "If anyone can look at the situation objectively, they can even see this guy tried to have someone murdered, and his reasoning was that he was on steroids so he was unable to think rationally, and he lost his religion, so he wasn't able to make any moral decisions. This is who he says he was at the time, and that's why he tried to kill her. If that's the type of person you're admitting to being, what sort of good mother do you think would let their kids hang around with that [kind of] personality?"

Lambesis was in the headlines again recently with news that he had filed a $35.5 million lawsuit against two California detention facilities, claiming that he was denied medication to counter the side effects of his steroid use that caused abnormally large breasts.

Hipa says, "It’s sad to see somebody that we spent so much of our lives with end up in such a place. He could have made such a great impact on this world, but he just gave in to the worst parts of himself. Even more discouraging for me is the fact that he’s trying to file a lawsuit for that amount. It says to me he’s still the same sort of personality at his core; nothing has changed. He thinks of himself a certain way, and he thinks of himself in a situation he created as a victim."

As stated, some of the reactions from people helped fuel the band's aggression on their new disc. Hipa recently told us, "We pay attention to feedback and a lot of people just criticized us a lot. But we didn’t write a record to cater to the criticism. We wanted to write a record that was a true response to it. We were a little bit pissed off that so many people in the wake of us releasing an album and all the personal things that were going on in our lives and unfolding, to see the way that those were being criticized or commented on, it was something that was hard not to acknowledge. So for us, it was like with this record we need to learn how to address those things and get out what we want to say and communicate artfully and creatively. And I think that’s part of why this record is a lot darker, and a little bit more aggressive." Wovenwar's Honor Is Dead album arrives this Friday (Oct. 21).

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